Transgender Usenet Archive Project

2018 Update: I’ve released an updated version of the archive and integrated it into the Queer Digital History Project. An updated version of this page is available there. However, this page will be maintained in its current state for historical purposes.

This page is the hub for all of the various parts of the Transgender Usenet Archive (TUA). The TUA offers access to nearly 400,000 posts (from 1994 to 2013) collected from five transgender-themed Usenet newsgroups: alt.transgendered, soc.support.transgendered, alt.support.srs, alt.support.crossdressing, and alt.fashion.crossdressing. The posts below talk more about the project, as well as my process in designing and building the archive. All of my work has been completed thanks to the generous support of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).

Visualizing Poster Activity on Usenet – Discusses some of my forays into using big data methods with the Usenet archives, including my visualizations and the cisgender usage network analysis in particular. (The code I used to make this network can be found here.)

Associated Links:

Transgender Usenet Visualizations – Visualizations I’ve done using the archival data, which put some of the (larger) numbers into visual context. These visualizations have been collected using the scripts I’ll be posting to GitHub (see below).

Usenet Data Collection Tools (GitHub) – A collection of scripts (in Python 2.7) for collecting, organizing, and analyzing data from Usenet archives (primarily those hosted by the Internet Archive in their Usenet Historical Collection). I’ll be adding more and more scripts as I develop/debug them.